RE: IRI BOF followup

Certainly we need consistency.  The consensus on our end is that the "list" needs to be in a consistent direction.  There's a lot of concern that if a.b is reordered b.a, but not other times, then users might be get confused. 

I can see where http://microsoft.com might lead someone to expect http://A.B.microsoft.com to render as http://B.A.microsoft.com so that "microsoft.com" stays "the same", but the precedence then becomes very muddy for the rest of it.

Anyway, I don't expect to solve it in this thread, I'd just like a little bit of usability testing done because I think that users find the behavior in the draft fairly confusing.  (That's the feedback we've gotton from internal bidi users and the Saudi Government anyway).

So maybe a focus group within the new working group to look at this problem would be good :)

-Shawn

________________________________________
From: "Martin J. Dürst" [duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp]
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 2:03 AM
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: Larry Masinter; public-iri@w3.org; Matitiahu Allouche
Subject: Re: IRI BOF followup

Hello Shawn,

Many thanks for your feedback on the charter.

On 2009/12/09 8:50, Shawn Steele wrote:
> I guess that covers some of my concerns, but the draft charter isn't clear if this is covered.
>
> Regarding draft-duerst-iri-bis specifically, I think that we need to consciously seek native BIDI speakers.

The current design, both for IDNA(2003) and RFC 3987, was strongly
influenced by Mati Allouche, a top Bidi expert and native Bidi writer
(the term "BIDI speaker" is a bit strange, as bidi only is an issue when
written). I have cc'ed him.

> Some previous IDN work seems to have missed that (don't know about IRI), so it might be good to include that "we will get input from native RTL speakers."
>
> Chatting with Arabic-speaking colleagues and input from the Saudi government would expect very different behavior from what martin proposes.   Specifically they native speakers seem to treat the different parts as a list that progresses in a single direction.  Eg: http://ab.CDE.FGH/ij/kl/mn/op.html is parsed as a list {http, ab, cde, fgh, ij,kl, mn, op(.html?)}  So the expected rendering would be from the one end of the list to the other.

I can tell you that something along these lines would very much be my
expectation, too (even not being native). The real problem with bidi for
IDNs and IRIs is that we are between a rock and a hard place.

It's not too difficult to get input from native speakers on what might
look best. But what's really difficult is to conciliate that input with
the rest of the requirements for bidi IDN or IRI display. There are
mainly two:

1) Bidi IRIs have to be displayed consistently everywhere they appear,
or we get hopeless user confusion and another attack surface for scams.

2) The display chosen has to work in running text, without knowing that
there's an IDN or IRI, or where it starts or ends.

It is very important that we keep these goals (for more details, please
see the IDAN 2008 bidi draft, which spells them out more explicitly in
an IDN context) in mind both for the charter and for our actual work.


Below a few more technical explanations and comments, not directly
relevant to the charter.


> Furthermore, in an RTL/BIDI context, those users seem to prefer that the list be rendered from RTL.  In other words:
>
> ???/mn/kl/ij/HGF.EDC.ab//:http

I think that the current requirement of an LTR context for IRIs may be
too strong, and that in particular for absolute IRIs, the potential for
confusion would not be much bigger if we allowed both LTR and RTL
context, but I think we need to be very careful about that. If we went
that way, that would allow

???/ij/kl/mn/HGF.EDC.http//:ab

(not very helpful, but that's as good as it gets if you let the bidi
algorithm do its work), or more importantly,

???/NM/LK/JI/HGF.EDC.AB//:http


> I even got the expectation that in an Arabic browser they'd expect to see:
>
> com.microsoft//:http

What Mati has explained to me is that those users that think mostly
logically and internally (that includes most of us tech guys) and who
know how a domain name and an IRI parses may indeed expect
com.microsoft. However, more visually oriented people with less
understanding of the syntax and what's behind it (which means the
majority of the population) may be better served by seeing
"microsoft.com" as "microsoft.com" independent of context. This is
essentially what the bidi algorithm tries to do for natural running
text, namely to keep sequences of LTR words in an internally LTR
direction, even in an overall RTR context. Thus, you can see something like:

    CIBARA CIBARA hello world CIBARA CIBARA

as quite equivalent to:

    CIBARA CIBARA microsoft.com CIBARA CIBARA

> The ??? is because I don't know what the expectation of the file "op.html" is.  Is it expected to be a single unit, or 2 parts?  I didn't ask that question.

What happens with such a thing in places in Arabic/Hebrew (or just any
other) Windows where that's displayed (in particular for OP.html)?

> So I think this needs a serious usability study on the part of the WG.

I don't think IETF WGs are good at doing usability studies. Larry's text
about explicit review is more along the lines of what an IETF WG
typically does, and is fine by me except for the "of ..., of" repetition
and the use of "native speakers", which in this context really has to be
"native writers". But these are details which can be fixed later.

Regards,   Martin.

> -Shawn
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-iri-request@w3.org [mailto:public-iri-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Larry Masinter
> Sent: ??????, ???????? 08, ??? 2009 14:11
> To: Shawn Steele; public-iri@w3.org
> Subject: RE: IRI BOF followup
>
> The current document has extensive work on BIDI in it already.
> Are there particular points or requirements that aren't already in scope by way of already being mentioned in draft-duerst-iri-bis?
>
> Larry
> --
> http://larry.masinter.net
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shawn Steele [mailto:Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 11:53 AM
> To: Larry Masinter; public-iri@w3.org
> Subject: RE: IRI BOF followup
>
> I would like to see BIDI presentation explicitly called out.  It seems to be something that isn't working very well and maybe hasn't gotten enough expert attention in the past.  It could be part of the Internationalization BCP, but I think it should be called out.
>
> -Shawn
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-iri-request@w3.org [mailto:public-iri-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Larry Masinter
> Sent: ??????, ???????? 08, ??? 2009 11:42
> To: public-iri@w3.org
> Subject: FW: IRI BOF followup
>
> FYI (should have sent this more broadly); we're trying to prep for the IESG review of forming an IRI working group.
>
> Please review proposed charter ASAP.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Masinter
> Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 10:46 AM
> To: '"Martin J. Dürst"'; Alexey Melnikov
> Cc: Pete Resnick; Ted Hardie; Lisa Dusseault
> Subject: RE: IRI BOF followup
>
> I made a pass over the draft charter to update the dates, deliverables, and to tweak Martin's wording. I made it clear that the only purpose of splitting the draft would be to facilitate editing.
>
> Larry
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Friday, 11 December 2009 19:55:12 UTC